Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (117 page)

The Confederation of the Rhine

Political fragmentation was in some ways greater after 1806, because dissolution of imperial structures removed the common framework, leaving central Europe divided into the Austrian Empire, Prussia and the sovereign states grouped into Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine. Fragments of the Empire persisted alongside these larger entities. West Pomerania remained Swedish until 1815, Jever was still
Russian up to 1818, while Denmark held Holstein until forced to relinquish this in 1864. All three enclaves owed their survival to Napoleon’s reluctance to antagonize the powers that owned them. The Teutonic Order commandery at Mergentheim was reserved to Austria by the Peace of Pressburg. Austrian troops guarded this outpost in Swabia until the 1809 war with France, which saw Mergentheim annexed by Württemberg as Napoleon’s ally.
²²
Although Hanover disappeared in the territorial redistribution after 1806, it retained a shadowy existence through the service of most of its former army as the King’s German Legion with the British from 1803 to 1815.

Dynastic continuity was still more striking. Not only did the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns remain rulers of large states, but 39 princely families and dynastic branches survived as sovereigns in the Confederation of the Rhine. These included the rulers of tiny Schaumburg-Lippe, which had only just escaped Hessian annexation, thanks to the imperial courts in 1787 (see
p. 642
). The von der Leyen family, elevated from imperial knights to counts as recently as 1711, became princes in 1803 and survived after 1806 thanks to kinship with both Dalberg and Josephine Bonaparte. Their possessions were only mediatized in 1815, passing first to Austria and then Baden after 1819. The Liechtensteins made it all the way from former ministeriales to twenty-first-century sovereigns, having acquired huge estates in Styria, Moravia, Bohemia and Silesia after the twelfth century to become imperial princes in 1623. They finally obtained a Reichstag vote a century later for their lordship of Vaduz, comprising a mere 165 square kilometres, which they bought in 1712. The Liechtensteins secured independence by joining the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806, though their real wealth lay in the estates they retained in the Austrian empire. They escaped integration within Bismarck’s Germany by forging a customs union between Vaduz and Austria in 1866. A similar relationship with Switzerland then ensured the continued survival of the Liechtensteins after 1919.

The Confederation developed in four stages, with the initial 16 members leaving the Empire in July 1806. Electoral Saxony joined the Confederation in December, becoming a kingdom, as did the Ernestine Saxon dukes, all of whom sought a closer relationship with Napoleon after his comprehensive victory over Prussia that October. The third phase began in April 1807 when 12 northern and central German
principalities from the former neutrality zone joined the Confederation, and ended when Napoleon created the new kingdom of Westphalia in December. Finally, Oldenburg and the two branches of Mecklenburg joined in 1808. Napoleon deliberately preserved some of the smaller states as thorns in the sides of their larger neighbours like Bavaria and Württemberg to hold these in check. Although fully sovereign, all were vulnerable. Napoleon was the Confederation’s ‘protector’, but annexed Oldenburg, Salm-Salm, Salm-Kyrburg and Arenberg, as well as truncating the grand duchy of Berg to expand French territory to the North Sea coast in December 1810. Simultaneously, he seized the cities of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck, which had survived since 1806 without joining the Confederation.

Many continued to draw inspiration from the Empire in their efforts to make the Confederation more viable and less vulnerable to Napoleonic whim. Franz Joseph von Albini, Dalberg’s chief minister, persuaded Dalberg not to resign, but instead to lay down his imperial arch-chancellorship on 31 July 1806 and accept Napoleon’s offer to become the Confederation’s ‘prince-premier’ (
Fürstprimus
).
²³
Dalberg hoped the position would allow him to shape the Confederation as a modernized, streamlined, federal version of the Empire. Napoleon indulged him, allowing him to submit various draft constitutions, all of which envisaged the French emperor as ‘protector’ with the position of prince-premier as substitute arch-chancellor. A ‘federal assembly’ (
Bundestag
) would convene in Regensburg in place of the Reichstag. Votes were to be distributed roughly according to size, with Bavaria receiving six, Württemberg four, the prince-premier and all grand dukes three each, Nassau two and the rest one apiece. Status thinking persisted in the idea of dividing the assembly into a college of kings and one of princes.

The plans attracted some interest, especially as the weaker Confederation princes hoped a constitution would silence the legal debate as to whether the Empire had been dissolved or was merely currently occupied by France and its allies.
²⁴
However, all princes clung to their new sovereignty and feared that, like today’s opponents of the EU, common institutions would cramp their independence. Napoleon had no interest in federal structures that might provide a platform to oppose his military and political demands. Dalberg persisted, remaining loyal to the Confederation till the end and refusing to open negotiations with the
Allies once it became obvious that Napoleon was losing the war. Instead, Dalberg abdicated on 28 October 1813 in favour of Eugène de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s stepson, who had been designated next prince-premier in 1810. After temporary exile in Konstanz, Dalberg was allowed by Bavaria to return as the new, purely clerical, archbishop of Regensburg in 1814.

Confirming the End

Compared to the Empire, the Confederation offered very little to its inhabitants who experienced it, much as the Habsburg official Joseph Haas predicted, now simply as Napoleon’s recruiting sergeant and tax collector. After France’s defeat, there was a strong desire to return to normality, which most still associated with the Empire. Many expected that the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), convened to agree the post-Napoleonic settlement, would restore the Empire. The future Prussian king, Frederick William IV, felt the Empire had simply been in ‘abeyance’ since 1806 and wanted to revive as much of it as possible.
²⁵
The prince regent and future king George IV and his ministers saw restoring the Empire as a way to recover Hanover. George only assumed the title of king of Hanover in October 1814 when it became obvious the Empire would not be resurrected, making it necessary to match Bavarian, Saxon and Württemberg royal status.
²⁶

Others persisted further, notably Count Friedrich Ludwig of Solms-Laubach, who had been a prime mover in Prince Karl of Isenburg-Birstein’s Frankfurt Union of 1803. Unlike his fellow princes after 1806, Count Friedrich wanted to reverse the mediatization of minor rulers like those in Erbach and Leiningen and he lobbied Napoleon on their behalf – unsurprisingly without effect. He adapted the older rhetoric of imperial patriotism to the new language of German nationalism voiced during the 1813 campaign to present the aristocrats as fighting for their fatherland. At the end of the year he formed an association reminiscent of those of the early modern counts to mobilize minor princes who had lost their autonomy since 1803 or were likely to do so now. He won some sympathy from the influential Prussian minister Baron Stein, but merely managed to secure an extension of the mediatized rulers’ existing privileges when the German Confederation was established in June 1815.
²⁷
Rather more surprising was the desire
among many ordinary inhabitants for a reversal of the changes since 1803, particularly for their communities to recover autonomy or to be returned to their previous rulers. Baden and Württemberg arrested pro-Austrian sympathizers to scotch a movement calling for a restoration of Habsburg rule in Swabian lands they had acquired in 1806.
²⁸

The process of defeating Napoleon had already rendered such hopes illusory by the autumn of 1813 when the Allies confirmed that Bavaria and Württemberg could keep their new territories in return for changing sides against France. By then, a decade of near-continuous warfare had demonstrated the military potential of the enlarged principalities, ensuring that the interests of their sovereigns could not be ignored by Austria and Prussia. With partition between the two great powers now off the agenda for the moment, the Congress of Vienna defaulted to the Empire for inspiration as how to organize central Europe. Taking their cue from Dalberg – though without saying so – all proposals presented a rationalized, federal version of the old order. Despite his famous advocacy of a ‘national monarchy’, Stein’s proposal was really a romanticized version of medieval emperorship presiding over a federalized Empire including enlarged Austrian and Prussian monarchies.
²⁹
The past shaped discussions directly. For example, the agreements from the last two imperial elections in 1790 and 1792 were used to guide what powers any new emperor might have. Most proposals envisaged some kind of Kreis structure to group the smaller states. All proposed a federal congress based on the Reichstag. No one seriously considered a republic.

The result was the German Confederation of Austria, Prussia, 4 kingdoms, 18 grand duchies, 11 principalities and 4 free cities. All were considered sovereign, yet combined within elements of a federal state. The new Federal Diet (
Bundestag
) opened in November 1816 in the Thurn und Taxis palace in Frankfurt, establishing a symbolic link to the Empire, because princes from that family had been the Habsburgs’ principal commissioners to the Reichstag during the later eighteenth century. The Confederation shared much of the Empire’s imprecision and fudge. Its constitution was drawn up hastily during the Hundred Days campaign after Napoleon’s surprise return from Elba in February 1815. Many elements were little more than vague suggestions, leaving future developments open, though convergence along federal lines was clearly an option.

Lacking precision, the Confederation partly defaulted to old imperial practice. Austria’s emperors were formally hereditary Confederation presidents, but were still treated with a general deference owing more to the Holy Roman imperial legacy than the Austrian imperial title assumed only in 1804. The Habsburgs were still the only German imperial family. They fared no worse than the Hohenzollerns, who had been humiliatingly defeated in 1806 and had to be pushed by their generals into changing sides against Napoleon at the end of 1812. Austria’s further defeat in 1809 had at least burnished the Habsburgs’ patriotic credentials, since they had assumed the challenge of liberating Germany without support from other German rulers. All the new German princes gathered at Schönbrunn Palace when Ferdinand succeeded Francis II in 1835 as the first Habsburg emperor who had not also once held the Holy Roman title. Frankfurt city council embarked on a 15-year project after 1838 to decorate the ‘emperor’s room’ in their city hall with portraits of every monarch from Charlemagne to Francis II. The Habsburgs attracted considerable sympathy when Austria fought alone and lost against France and Piedmont in the War of Italian Unification in 1859. Only the Hohenzollerns contested their leadership role and even then not consistently before mid-century. Prussia’s king was the only Confederation sovereign absent when Austria’s new emperor, Franz Joseph, convened a summit in Frankfurt in 1863 to debate political reforms.

The Confederation Act of 1815 established the judicial sovereignty of each member state, instructing them to create their own courts of appeal. Article 12 allowed the four free cities to refer cases to courts in other states to ensure impartiality, rather like the practice of seeking judicial advice used in the early modern Empire (see
pp. 628–36)
. Similarly, the Federal Diet acted as an informal supreme court, in the same manner as the Reichstag, which had performed this function without its being specified constitutionally. As with so many other early liberal aspirations, these vague arrangements proved incapable of preventing arbitrary justice in some Confederation members.
³⁰

Article 14 declared some previous laws null and void in an effort to prevent conflict between the legal systems of Confederation members and those of the mediatized territories within their new borders. However, it was unclear whether Francis’s abdication in 1806 had ended the validity of imperial law, especially as territorial law largely derived from
this and often incorporated it verbatim. Only Berg and Westphalia had adopted the Napoleonic Code. Austria, Bavaria and Oldenburg had reformed their codes by 1814, but the process was slow elsewhere, lasting between 1769 and 1820 in Hessen-Darmstadt. Holstein already declared in September 1806 that the Carolina penal code and other imperial laws remained valid unless they explicitly contradicted its own law. Most followed this expedient, and it was adopted in Article 23 of the Vienna Congress Final Accord of 1820, which endorsed the continued validity of all imperial laws and norms that were still useful in the successor states.
³¹
The difficulties encountered in changing existing legal arrangements help explain the survival of corporate society beyond 1806.

THE EMPIRE IN EUROPEAN HISTORY AFTER 1815

Attitudes outside Germany

Dealing with the Empire’s historical legacy took far longer. The viability of the German Confederation was compromised by Austria’s dual role as its president and as guarantor of the settlement imposed on Italy by the Vienna Congress. This superficially mirrored the geographic extent of the Empire, but the circumstances were very different, because the former princely houses and civic republics of imperial Italy had been swept away by the French after 1796. Only the House of Savoy was restored (to Piedmont in 1814), but was considered too weak to defend Italy against possible future French aggression. Austria now ruled Lombardy and Venetia as possessions outside the German Confederation. Three of the other remaining four north Italian states were governed by the Habsburgs’ relations. Meanwhile, the papacy was restored in central Italy and the Bourbons resumed as kings of Naples-Sicily. As neither were interested in Italian unity, Piedmont emerged as Italy’s champion, assuming a place equivalent to Prussia for many German nationalists.